Mr. Biswas came in and presently walked into the room, saying in his rallying voice, “Well, well. What happen to our Hans Andersen?”
“Eat some prunes, son,” Shama said, taking out the little brown paper-bag from the table drawer.
Mr. Biswas saw the distress on Anand’s face and his manner changed. “What’s the matter?”
Anand said, “The boys laugh at me.”
“He who laughs last laughs best,” Shama said.
“Lawrence say that his father is your boss.”
There was silence.
Mr. Biswas sat on the bed and said, “Lawrence is the night editor. Nothing to do with me.”
“He say they have you like an office boy in the office.”
“You know I write features.”
“And he say that when you go to his father house you have to go to the back door.”
Mr. Biswas stood up. His linen suit was crumpled, the jacket pulled out of shape by the notebooks in the pockets, the tops of which were dirty and a little frayed.
“You never went to his father house?”
“Why should he go to Lawrence’s house?” Shama said.
“And you never went to the back door?”
Mr. Biswas walked to the window. It was dark; his back was to them.
“Let me put on the light,” Shama said briskly. Her footsteps were heavy. The light went on. Anand covered his face with his arm. “Is that all that’s been upsetting you?” Shama asked. “Your father has nothing to do with Lawrence. You heard what he said. “
Mr. Biswas went out of the room.
Shama said, “You shouldn’t have told him that, you know, son.”
For the rest of that evening Shama walked and talked and did everything as noisily as she could.
The next morning, with his books and lunch parcel in his bag and the six cents for milk in his pocket, Anand was kissing Shama in the back verandah when Mr. Biswas came to him and said, “I don’t depend on them for a job. You know that. We could go back any time to Hanuman House. All of us. You know that.”
On Saturday he took the children on a surprise visit to Ajodha’s. Tara and Ajodha were as delighted as the children, and the visit lasted till Sunday. There was much to look at in the new house. It was a grand two-storeyed concrete house built and decorated and furnished in the modern manner. The concrete blocks looked like rough-hewn stone; there was no dust-collecting fretwork hanging from the eaves; doors and windows were varnished, not painted, and closed and opened in interesting ways; chairs were upholstered and vast, not small and cane-bottomed; floors were stained and polished; the lavatory flushes were chainless. In the drawing-room they studied Tara’s photographs of the dead; they saw Raghu in his flower-strewn coffin surrounded by his thin, big-eyed children. The kitchen was enormous and abounded in modern contrivances; Tara, old, slow and oldfashioned, seemed out of place in it. When they were tired of the house they wandered about the yard, which had not changed. They talked to the cowman and the gardener, examined the various people who called, and played among the abandoned frames of motor vehicles. After lunch on Saturday they went to the cinema, and on Sunday Ajodha arranged an excursion.
The following week-end they went again, and the weekend after that; and soon this week-end visit was established. They travelled up on Saturday morning, since that was the only time it was reasonably easy to get a bus out of Port of Spain. As soon as they got on the bus in the George Street station Mr. Biswas changed, dropping his week-day moroseness and becoming gay and even impish. The mood lasted until Sunday evening; then they were all silent as they got nearer the city, the house, Shama, Monday morning. For a day or two afterwards the house in Port of Spain seemed dark and clumsy.
Shama went on only one of these visits, and that she almost ruined. The old, unspoken antagonism between the families still existed and she was not eager to go. There had been a minor quarrel just before they went through the gate, and Shama was sullen when she stepped into Tara’s house. Then, either from pride, or because she was made uneasy by the grandeur of the house, or because she was unable to make the effort, she remained sullen throughout the week-end. She said afterwards that she had known all along that Ajodha and Tara did not care for her; and she never went again.
She was often alone in Port of Spain. The children were not anxious to go with her to Hanuman House, and as dissension there increased she went less often herself, regretting the old warmth, fearing to be involved in new quarrels. She had hardly moved outside her own family and did not know how to get on with strangers. She was shy of people of another race, religion or way of life. Her shyness had got her a reputation for hardness among the tenants, and she had done little to get to know the woman who lived in Owad’s old room. But now, alone at the week-ends, she felt the need of company and sought out the woman, who not only responded, but showed herself exceedingly curious. And Shama took down her account books and explained.
So the house became Shama’s, the place where she stayed, the place to which Mr. Biswas and the children returned with sadness after the week-end.
And during the week Anand’s life was a misery. While Mr. Biswas struggled with features on the splendid work of the Chacachacare Leper Settlement (with a photograph of lepers at prayer) and the Young Offenders’ Detention Institution (with a photograph of young offenders at prayer), Anand wrote down and learned by heart copious notes on geography and English. Textbooks were discarded; only the notes of the teacher mattered; any deviation was instantly and severely punished; and there was not a day when some boy was not flogged and put to stand behind the blackboard. For this was the exhibition class, where no learning mattered except that which led to good examination results; and the teacher knew his job. At home Mr. Biswas read Anand Self-Help and on his birthday gave him Duty, adding as a pure frivolity a school edition of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Childhood, as a time of gaiety and irresponsibility, was for these exhibition pupils only one of the myths of English Composition. Only in compositions did they give delirious shouts of joy and their spirits overflowed into song; only there did they indulge in what the composition notes called “schoolboy’s pranks”.
Anand, following the example of those Samuel Smiles heroes who had in youth concealed the brilliance of their later years, did what he could to avoid school. He pretended to be ill; he played truant, forged excuses, was found out and flogged; he destroyed his shoes. He abandoned private lessons one afternoon, telling the teacher that he was wanted at home for a Hindu prayer ceremony which could take place only at half past three that afternoon, and telling his parents that the teacher’s mother had died and the teacher had gone to the funeral. Mr. Biswas, anxious to remain in the teacher’s favour, cycled to the school the next day to offer his condolences. Anand was called a young scamp (the teacher sank in his estimation for using a word that sounded so slangy), flogged and left behind the blackboard. At home Mr. Biswas said, “Those private lessons are costing me money, you know.” “Pranks” were permitted only in English Composition.
Most of his male cousins had undergone the brahminical initiation, and though Anand shared Mr. Biswas’s distaste for religious ritual, he was immediately attracted by this ceremony. His cousins had had their heads shaved, they were invested with the sacred thread, told the secret verses, given little bundles and sent off to Benares to study. This last was only a piece of play-acting. The attraction of the ceremony lay in the shaving of the head: no boy with a shaved head could go to a predominantly Christian school. Anand began a strong campaign for initiation. But he knew Mr. Biswas’s prejudices and worked subtly. He told Mr. Biswas one evening that he was unable to offer up the usual prayers with sincerity, since the words had become meaningless. He needed an original prayer, so that he could think of each word. He wanted Mr. Biswas to write this prayer for him, though he made it clear that, unlike Mr. Biswas, he wanted no east-west compromise: he wanted a specifically Hindu prayer. The prayer was written. And Anand got Shama to bring a coloured print of the goddess Lakshmi from Hanuman House. He hung the print on the wall above his table and objected when lights were turned on in the evening before he had said his prayer to Lakshmi. Shama was delighted at this example of blood triumphing over environment; and Mr. Biswas, despite his Aryan aversion to Sanatanist, Tulsi-like idol worship, could not hide the honour he felt at being asked to write Anand’s prayer. After some time Anand complained that the whole procedure was improper, a mockery, and would continue to be so until he had been initiated.